The Final Blow in the Five Syllables
by Skole
Summary: Post 5x21 'The Boy with the Answer' *Spoiler alert **Angst alert They won the case against the Gravedigger, but Heather Taffett had the last laugh, because everybody loses. Please read, review and refute my take on this one...


**The Final Blow in the Five Syllables - Rated T**

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**Disclaimer: **I do not own BONES – which is probably a good thing, because I predict an infestation of angst bunnies upon their house.

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**A/N: I have seen 'The Boy with the Answer' – if you have not, you should. If you do not wish to be spoiled, click 'back' on your browser. If the season finale is devoid of fluff, then the summer hiatus (winter down here in Oz) is going to be super-angsty! I'm thinking of writing Glee fan fic over winter just so I can do some mash ups of my BONES-writing playlist – that is saying something, because seriously, song fics are not how I roll… For readers who have read my other stuff, this is a little different.**

**Please take the time to review and share your own take on 5x21. Did you see what I saw?**

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Temperance Brennan did not desire or require the talents of Dr. Sweets to provide her with an analysis of her dreams…No, _her nightmares_. The river of blood as life ebbed away, the flood of seawater stealing precious air away, the crushing pressure of earth taking human contact away. Ultimately, the nightmares were reflections of her greatest fears for those most precious, tenuous connections in her life.

Heather Taffett had tried to break her, had tried to break them all. In that first moment of possibility, where logic suggested that Brennan had the chance to move on with her life, the final blow was struck.

As a guilty Taffett was being led to the holding cells – the Gravedigger played the Ace up her sleeve. Five syllables, delivered with a sneer.

'_This isn't over'_

Those five syllables were the five digits on Taffetts' left hand, digging into her thyroid cartilage, crushing her neck. Brennan felt the 125 pound killer kneeling on her chest, cracking her ribs, crushing the last vestiges of her remaining courage and resistance; just as the 10 year-old victim had been crushed, the terminal taste of Taffetts' blood in his mouth as he bit her in desperation.

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Brennans' nemesis had seen through her wall of logic, her intellect, her indomitable drive to find the truth. Taffett had made an accurate assessment in the courtroom during her cross-examination and summation. Temperance Brennan was a tortured, broken Forensic Anthropologist, and more like that 10 year-old boy than anyone cared to consider. Five syllables had cracked her outer shell, throwing Brennan into freefall. It hit her like the shoveled clod of earth in her nightmare, as her reality began to unravel. Taffett wanted her to suffer a fate worse than death, losing everything that she had come to depend upon, by tearing her family apart.

Brennan failed to recognise that her greatest strengths revealed her greatest weaknesses, particularly when she pushed her protectors away. Booth, Hodgins, her father. The fact that she hated psychology was a significant issue – the truth was that she feared it just a little bit too. Taffett smelled that fear in Temperance Brennan; it was warm and coppery like the congealing, coagulated, terminally acidotic blood of her suffocated victims. Irresistible. Heather Taffett was evil; probably a genius too, and she had a plan which included using a weapon that Brennan flatly refused to grant a scrap of validity to – psychology.

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Those who believed and asserted that Temperance Brennan was a cold fish, an ice queen, a freak with a missing emotional chip; they couldn't have been more mistaken. Booth instinctively knew the truth, which is why he dared to love her. That truth, was that Brennan, underneath that cool, rational, controlled façade, did in fact feel – more acutely than all of those around her. If the ability to feel emotion was charted on a normal distribution curve, she was three standard deviations above the mean. Sweets would classify this intensity as _'some mega-bitchin' serious emotion, dude.'_

Inside the cranium of Dr. Brennan, where the super-brain resided, each and every one of those feelings, emotions and experiences were felt for a micro-second, intensely, then categorised, catalogued and placed into limbo – ironically just like all those bones – in the hope that one day, she could take them out and give them an identity too, assimilating them into her damaged and tortured reality. The reality that was now tearing itself apart because Taffett saw the chink in her armour and aimed for it.

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The team had won; but at what cost? For so long, their team, the squint squad, like a single cell had been quiescently stable, the Gravedigger had forced them into interphase, synthesizing and growing. Now they were heading toward the inevitable mitosis phase as the cell prepared to divide; prepared to move on. Brennan and Booth had been the centre, the nucleus, for so long, but their partnership – the DNA strands, were unraveling as mitosis inevitably pulled them apart.

Hodgins now had Angela as his wife, moving on by forming their own bond, a new daughter cell – a new centre, and the centre should hold. Cam was losing her grip on the team, as surely as Booth was losing his grip on Brennan.

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Where Brennan had been desperately grabbing at the tatters of her relationship with Booth a few weeks earlier, maintaining a death grip on her working relationship in the absence of an open heart, as he resolved to move on without her. The scenario was now tragically transposed, and like her nightmare it terrified her. Outside the Founding Fathers Bar, makeshift confetti scattered around their feet, Booth was now the one grabbing at the tatters, a death grip on their working partnership, as she considered moving on, unable to face their future.

The emotion she experienced as she hailed a taxi was new, something that she found impossible to quantify, difficult to qualify, and incapable of being rationalised.

It was empathy.

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Were they cursed to move in an awkward lockstep like this forever? Had they missed their moment yet again?

FIN

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**A/N 2:** **Only Hart and the BONES team can answer those last two questions. Until then, they remain rhetoric.**


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